by Don Wilcox
Obviously, by so changing her body, her sole remaining position in life would be mental, the pursuit of thought, wisdom, and advice. No longer, due to the radiations, would her normal function of life, motherhood, womanliness, be possible. Scientifically, there is a great logic contained here, and who can say that primitive peoples have not discovered the simple truths of psychology that modern psychologists know?
What happened to the beautiful Looma may appear fantastic, but basically, its reality may stagger modern science, when its phenomenon is more fully studied by interested scientists. Perhaps, in future times, civilization may utilize basically the same principles to cause human beings to adapt themselves to specialized tasks for the betterment of the race.
INVISIBLE RAIDERS OF VENUS
First published in Amazing Stories, April 1941
The ship crashed, and Venusians came out of it—only to vanish into thin air. Where did they 90? What was their mission here?
Yes. I saw the crash. The big ship nosed out of the cloud with its counter-motors screaming, scraped its belly against the mountainside, showered sparks into the pine trees. The rip and roar echoed down the valley, and I’ll bet the summer-cottage people down there were scared out of their wits.
The ship almost nosed over, hovered upright, then fell back with a big bang. Its big chrysalis-shaped body sprayed black smoke.
“The damned dials jammed—”
“Shut up and get moving!”
Over the clatter of falling wreckage I heard the violent shouts of several men. speaking in perfect Venusian! Through the smoke and dust I saw the lightning escape of most of the ship’s occupants.
They flew from the place like so many colored bats out of hell. No expression could better describe it, from the Earth-man’s viewpoint. With a flutter of their yellow hair and silk shirts they skimmed across the clearing like blazes of colored light—and disappeared!
My eyes tried to follow them, but invisibility engulfed them almost instantly—
Then and there I determined to follow them. I had my own reasons. But before I had run more than twenty steps I heard a lot of yelling from down the mountainside. The men from the summer homes came running at breakneck speed, and women trailed after them gasping and wailing in terrified excitement.
I edged back into a clump of rocks and waited.
The people from the summer homes went after the wreckage like born heroes. They dragged two bodies out of the flames—both dead. They beat out the fires. They muttered disappointment because they weren’t able to save any lives. They pondered over where the ship had come from and why so large a ship should contain only two men.
“It’s from Venus,” declared one erudite rescuer, peering through his spectacles at a bit of printed matter. “This is a scrap of one of the most popular Venus newspapers. I’ve often read it—”
The crowd gathered around him respectfully. It was a mark of education, in the thirtieth century, to be able to speak and read the languages of the other planets.
“It’s a Venus newspaper, but that doesn’t tell us anything,” the man-about-planets continued. The crowd rummaged around trying to find clues, but their speculations came to nothing. The governments of Venus, they agreed, were friendly to this planet; there was nothing about the wreckage to prove that this was a government ship, however. The crowd fell to arguing over whether the mission of these two men had been a friendly or an unfriendly one. Then police sirens came up the mountainside and the officers took the situation over and jotted down enough facts to make a perfunctory report.
At last everyone was gone. I crept out of hiding. I took a wide circling walk around the clearing.
The late afternoon sun was right to show up the thousand or so foottracks that the milling crowd had left, and likewise the tracks that extended out beyond the central stamping ground. These I examined with care. They were automobile tracks. They converged toward one of the nearby mountain roads. Anyone but me might have mistaken them for the tracks of mountain woodsmen or picnickers. But I knew better.
And I knew I would play the devil trying to follow the eight or ten Venusians that had slid away the instant the ship crashed to a stop. I sat down on a stump and grumbled at myself and stabbed at my boot sole with a pocket-knife.
I glanced back to notice what tracks I had left. Nothing but faint ones. They might have been any Earth-man’s tracks. Oh-oh! What was that? A bit of dead tree had been freshly snapped off. I walked over toward it.
Bonk!
I bumped into something metallic. The suddenness with which I struck the thing—or it struck me—made me stagger backward. I saw nothing, other than the trees ten yards ahead of me. Or almost nothing. I think, strictly speaking, that I saw a little patch of grayness hanging before my eyes—and after that bump a spot or two before my eyes was nothing to be surprised at.
I glanced about to make sure that no one was hurling rocks at me, and started on.
Bonk-kerbonk!
I stopped dead still. I took time out to rub my handkerchief over my skinned nose and bruised forehead. I blinked at the distant trees and moved toward them with my hands outstretched. A cool surface pressed against my hands—a surface that I couldn’t see.
The object was solid, metallic, and utterly invisible. And big! I groped my way around it, like a blind man. I passed my hands over the domed roof, the rounded nose, the built-in headlights, the front bumper—then back again over the sides of the tear-dropshaped body to the rear bumper. Say, it was a beaut! I wished I could have seen it!
A late model? Undoubtedly Venus’ latest, apart from the invisibility of the thing. And, as every man-about-planets knows, Venus has forged ahead in car building this century. I opened a door and climbed in.
I patted my hands over the invisible seat and floor just to make certain that no invisible fellow-passenger was in with me. Then I settled myself at the invisible controls and poked around until I struck the invisible starter button.
I backed out into the clearing. The atom-powered motor was perfectly noiseless. Except for the sense of touch at my hands and the feeling of the cushions supporting my body I could have sworn I was being wafted along by the air. The sensation was so baffling that for an instant I forgot my business and backed up thump! against a tree stump.
I shot forward and took the winding mountain road. For the first few minutes I was like the fellow riding off to war who got such a kick out of the scenery along the way that he forgot all about his kill-or-be-killed mission and shouted, “I wouldn’t have missed this trip for anything!” I forgot the big deal ahead.
Zang!
What a thrill! Imagine, if you can, sailing down the road with a fresh breeze blowing at you—flying, as it were, in a sitting position about three or four feet off the surface of the pavement. You look down and watch the road fly by under you. You can see everything back of you, and on both sides.
Now and then you see a fine spray of dust shooting back from where the front wheels must be, but it never reaches you. It blows back under the invisible floor.
Through the mirror over my windshield I could get a complete view of everything behind me, in spite of the fact that the mirror itself was invisible. It gave me the impression of having one little window full of changing scenery from some detached world, floating constantly just an arm’s length ahead of me.
Gradually I became aware that there were a few spots back of me that were floating along in a never-changing formation. I pulled out to the side of the road and stopped.
I got out and felt my way around the car. One of the spots was a visible patch of the rear bumper, the other two were part of the sidewall. Two-and-two clicked together and I had it. Those sidewall spots were where I had bumped myself when I first stumbled against the car. The patch on the rear bumper was where I had struck the stump.
In other words this new “light-metal” which the Venusians had invented must be handled with care. Its invisibility was a delicate thing. As long as the rhythmic elec
tronic action of its matter was undisturbed, light leaped through it as if it weren’t there. But give it a rap and it would come into view.
To be sure my theory was on the right track, I took a stone and thwacked the outer ends of the front bumper. At once I could see tiny spots of metal hanging in the air where my stone had struck. Spots no bigger than postage stamps.
I repeated the process on the rear bumper. Thus I had the outside dimensions of my vehicle defined by four spots. I would watch these spots if I should ever run into a narrow passage. But no one else, I contended myself, would be likely to see them, as small as they were.
Down the road I went at high speed. As my familiarity with my vehicle increased I drove with greater confidence. A city loomed up on the broad plain at the foot of the mountains and I was certain that the silk-shirted Venusians who had escaped death at the crash of their ship had gone that way.
Perhaps you do not understand why I should be so cocksure about them. Very well, take my word for it. I knew what the rescuers and the police who had gathered at the scene of the crash did not know.
I knew that that crash was not disaster enough to keep every living Venusian from jumping into the invisible cars, that hung under the fins of their big ship, to dash off at full speed.
I crowded the throttle.
At last I approached the outskirts of the city. I pulled up at the first filling station. Atomic motors have a way of thirsting for oil now and then.
The automatic bell brought the filling station attendant to the door. He stood there scratching his head as if wondering what the devil had made that bell go off.
I knew he couldn’t see me. I was satisfied that the all-around windshield, which I had closed just before pulling to a stop, protected me from sight. A glance at the filling station window proved my point. There was no reflection of either the car or me.
Not until I opened the door and stepped out. Then I could see myself, plain as day, stepping out of invisibility. The filling station attendant jumped so suddenly his cap fell off.
“Two quarts of oil,” I said.
The poor fellow blinked. He reached down and picked up his cap without ever taking his eyes off me.
“I desire two quarts of your best grade of oil,” I repeated in my most precise English.
“Whatcha gonna do with it? Pour it out on the ground?” the fellow asked.
“Does it make any difference as long as I pay you?” I retorted waving a bill of good American money at him. “Just hand me the oil. I’ll take care of it.” He did it, and for the next two minutes I had my back toward him while I fed the invisible engine. Then I turned around and gave him the bottles.
“Well, I’m damned,” he said, and his eyes were bugging like doorknobs. “First time I ever knew anyone to drink the stuff!”
“Tell me, friend,” I said, pausing with one foot in the invisible car door, “is there any way to get through the city without running into too much traffic?”
“If I were you I’d take a wide swing to the left. There’s a nut house on the right.”
“Would you be so kind as to tell me how far it is to New York? Could you give me a map—”
“We don’t put out no accommodations to hitchhikers.”
“But I’m a cash customer—”
I was wasting my breath, for at that moment another customer pulled in so close back of me that I thought he was going to smack me. He stopped inches short of my bumper spots.
Speaking of spots, I was in one. I knew it was high time for me to get going. The attendant was sure to make a round of the other car shortly, and if he stumbled into me my secret would be out. Chances are, if he wasn’t too baffled, he would call up some friendly cop and announce his discovery. Vaguely it was dawning on me that I constituted a traffic hazard.
Dammit! Where was that starter button? Oh, yes—wait, what was this, a parade? In my moment of floundering, three other cars had pulled up to the station. Two of them had taken the lane parallel to mine, the third now pulled up squarely in front of me and stopped with its front bumper against mine. Now I was really in a jam, locked between two cars.
“What happened to that damned hitchhiker?” I heard the attendant grunt. But nobody was interested in hitchhikers. Everyone wanted service and they wanted it now. The driver back of me began to yowl that he was first.
“Okay,” said the attendant. “Pull up so I can reach you.”
The car back of me started to pull up. It jumped a little and stalled.
“What’s the matter, no power?” the attendant said, frowning.
“Plenty of power!” the disturbed driver growled. He gunned his motor and we all shot forward. I added my power to the push, and the car ahead of me rolled back into a flower bed, and the driver was screaming, “What the hell!”
Anyway I was out.
I had my troubles getting through the city. Once I had to climb the sidewalk to keep from getting smashed. Once I forgot myself and opened the all-around windshield and signalled for a turn. The cop saw me. That is, he must have seen as much of me as showed at the windshield level—my head and shoulders and an arm.
As far as the cop could tell, that much of me was gliding through the air detached. The cop’s mouth fell open. I looked back to see him mop his brow and walk off his beat like a sick man.
But I got through the city without so much as getting ticked by another car, and as soon as that ordeal was over I parked and had a drink.
I scanned the newspaper, made some telephone calls, ate, and felt better. I set my watch by the clock on the tavern wall, paid my bill, and started to go out the door.
“Just a minute,” said the fellow back of the cash register. That phrase just-a-minute was one I never did appreciate. It lacks congeniality. Besides, I was in considerable hurry, having seen the newspaper and made my telephone calls and set my watch.
“I’ve been watching you,” said the tavern man.
“I’m not surprised,” I said, “since there happens to be no one else in the room for you to watch.”
“I heard a radio report a few minutes ago,” he continued, eyeing me like a judge, “that might interest you. Some Venus guys landed up in the mountains this afternoon. The boat cracked up in landing, and a couple of them got killed. But the police have doped it out that there must have been some more of them.”
“Surely not,” I said. “They wouldn’t go off and leave a couple of their brothers dead.”
“That’s what has got the police mystified, according to the radio. They figure the Venus guys must be hot on the trail of some devilment or they’d have stuck around.”
“Well, I wouldn’t worry about it,” I said. “If they’re Venusian criminals, as you imply, at least they won’t be able to get far without their ship.”
“That’s what the radio said,” the tavern man agreed, still studying me. “As long as trains and planes and buses keep on the lookout, they can’t get out of this corner of the Rockies.”
“Sure, they’ll be cornered in a day or two. If they’re hiding in the mountains, they’ll starve out in a week,” I said. “Well, so-long.”
“Just a minute,” said the tavern fellow. “The two dead ones had on colored silk shirts, they said. And they had bushy yellow hair, the kind Venus guys have.”
I planted my hands on my hips and eyed the fellow squarely. “What are you driving at, friend? Just because I happened to be born with yellow hair—”
“You’re wearing a silk shirt too—a blue one.”
“Of course I am. I always wear silk shirts. What the devil—”
“Can you talk Venus language?” the tavern man asked, tilting his head and stroking his chin.
“Squee-squeekle-squaggle-squam! Does that sound like Venusian to you?”
“Damned if I know. Might be—”
“Oh, I get it!” I said, brightening. “You’re simply warning me that with this shirt and hair, I’d better look out not to get crossed up with these birds. Okay.”
> I started for the door, determined that no just-a-minute would stop me again.
“A bunch of them was in here an hour ago,” said the tavern keeper.
I stopped as if I had been shot. He went on talking.
“Yep. Colored silk shirts, yellow hair and all. They ate and drank in a hurry, and beat it. Then the newscast came in on the radio and we knew what they were. But the sons-of-guns, nobody saw which way they went. They’re probably out sleeping in someone’s haystack.”
I sauntered back to the man with a mask of indifference, smiling. “All right, my friend, you’ve seen them. You’ve seen me. And yet you try to tell me I’m a Venusian—”
“I never seen them,” said the tavern man. “It was my daughter that fed them. She told me. She’s gone in to see the police—”
“All right,” I said. “Just content yourself that if they were traveling in a bunch that lets me out. I’m traveling alone.”
“They might have left you behind,” said the fellow, still stroking his chin. “They left two dead ones behind.”
“My friend,” I said, slipping a proton gun out of my pocket and polishing it with a handkerchief, “you’re running a tavern.”
“Yes, sir,” said the fellow, turning a little greenish.
“You’re here to serve your customers food and drink.”
“Yes, sir.”
“If you care to build up a thriving business, don’t go around accusing your good cash customers of all sorts of rash nonsense. That’s no way to build up a thriving business. Is it?”
“N-no, sir,” the fellow choked, stumbling back against the garbage can.
“How far is it to New York? Around two thousand miles?”
“Around that, sir. It’s a good road, sir.”
I gave the fellow a final glare from the doorway. “Don’t forget my tip, friend. Pull your neck in.”
He jerked his neck in so quickly it practically snapped. I went on my way.
Twenty-five miles down the road I saw something ahead of me. Some cars and some men. They were barricading the road.
